London School of Economics and Political Science
May 22, 2023
“research design that exploits the occurrence of an unexpected event during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey to estimate its causal effect on a relevant outcome by comparing responses of the individuals interviewed before the event \(t_i<t_e\) (control group) to those of respondents interviewed after the event \(t_i>t_e\) (treatment group).” (Muñoz et al., 2020, p. 187)
“the design is just a standard cross-section, but the day on which a respondent is interviewed is chosen randomly” (Johnston & Brady, 2022, p. 283)
“The data collected in an RCS allow a fine-grained analysis of dynamic phenomena of public opinion” (Lutz et al., 2013, p. 3)
Steps (Kenski et al., 2010):
Temporal ignorability: Moment of the interview should be as good as random
Excludability: Timing of the interview \(t\) affects \(Y\) only through event \(T\)
Compliance: assignment to the treatment (\(t_i>t_e\)) corresponds to actually receiving treatment (\(T=1\))
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